Rural AZ schools feel declining-enrollment squeeze
Arizona’s rural schools sit along dirt roads. They appear — like a mirage — on the side of empty stretches of two-lane interstates. They are 100-year-old landmarks in small mining towns.
The schools, specks on the map, are monuments to Arizona’s history.
Inside sits Arizona’s future.
But in most of Arizona’s rural counties, the public school systems are increasingly strained. The education funding crisis in Arizona schools highlighted by last year’s #RedForEd teacher protests is compounded in rural schools.
Ten Arizona counties, encompassing many of the state’s rural areas, have together lost more than 10,000
students in the past decade while Maricopa County’s student population has risen by more than 70,000, according to enrollment data.
Fewer students means less money for schools, limiting students’ educational opportunities and making it more difficult to recruit and pay qualified teachers. And unlike in suburban districts, rural communities can’t easily offset state funding losses with local taxes.
The effects are crushing. School closures can leave families driving long distances, or reliant on more controversial online school programs. Without enough qualified teachers, administrators are turning to longterm substitutes.
Rural students in Arizona graduate at lower rates than rural students in other states. They don’t perform as well on state testing as urban Arizona students.
The problems represent a cycle for rural Arizona communities, said Sean Rickert, with the Arizona Rural Schools Association and superintendent of Pima Unified School District in southeastern Arizona.
“The graduates are leaving and they’re not coming back, because they don’t see the economic opportunities,” he said.
Without the jobs, families don’t stay and school populations decline. Without good schools creating an educated workforce, jobs don’t come.
Crown King school has one student
The main road to Crown King from Interstate 17 is not paved. Some sections are so narrow that just one car can fit. There are rocky cliffs and hills covered with prickly pear, the epitome of a desert landscape.
And then drivers reach a short bridge into town, deemed the “magic bridge,” where jagged rocks yield to pine trees and a stream trickles underneath the one-lane crossing.
The town is a series of hills and small houses. In the middle sits an old-West saloon and Crown King Elementary, one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. The fire-engine red school building turned 100 a few years ago.
The district has one student, Logan Nelson, and one teacher, Shannon Olson.
Enrollment at Crown King fluctuates every year. The school year began with seven students, but a tragic car accident forced one family to move away. Another left midyear.
Logan, the only student left, is a third-generation Crown King Elementary student. Her father and grandfather both attended the school. She’s not lonely.
The 11-year-old gets the kind of oneon-one attention from her teacher that parents yearn for: In the morning, they sit on a shaggy rug and talk about history. During the math lesson, they hunch over Olson’s desk and work problemby-problem on box plots.
Logan and Olson eat lunch together and laugh over Garfield cartoons. Logan runs around Crown King’s small playground, unencumbered. Sometimes Olson runs, too.
“Honestly, it’s a blessing,” said Danielle Nelson, Logan’s mom. “She’s thriving.”
The school is imperative for the community, Olson said. Logan’s parents both work at the fire department, essential for an area vulnerable to wildfire. While the student population is unpredictable, there have always been students to serve.
The next-closest school, in Mayer, is more than an hour away on a rough road, difficult for a school bus to navigate and sometimes near-impossible for regular cars to drive through during inclement weather.
“There’s really not another option,” Olson said.
Online school exists, but internet in Crown King isn’t always reliable, either. For that reason, Logan took state testing on paper this year, not electronically like most Arizona students.
Crown King’s seesawing enrollment is unique. It’s hard to track how the student population has changed because the school has long enrolled just a handful of students.
But Crown King’s county, Yavapai, has lost more than 2,300 students in the past decade.
Exodus of students from rural areas
Rural population growth in America has lagged behind suburban and urban expansion for years, according to Pew Research. Arizona is no different.
The student population in Arizona has increasingly clustered in Maricopa County, according to enrollment data from the past two decades tracked by Anabel Aportela with the Arizona Schools Boards Association.
Since 2000, Maricopa County’s K-12 public district and charter student enrollment has gone from 481,934 students
Coming Monday
Inside an Arizona school that has only one student. to 737,280. The county has gone from having nearly 60% of the state’s students to 66%.
Other counties over the same two decades have experienced either less student growth or decline.
About 150 of the 230 public schools designated rural by the state have lost students since the 2011-2012 school year, according to an analysis of enrollment data by The Arizona Republic.
Many of the schools considered rural that gained enrollment are charter schools, which have proliferated in the past decade in Arizona. While Maricopa County boasts the lion’s share of the state’s charter schools, some have sprung up in more populated towns like Flagstaff and Prescott.
Rural charter school enrollment has somewhat increased, but it does not make up for enrollment lost at district schools.
Tourist towns like Sedona struggle, too
Tiny towns aren’t alone in losing students. More popular rural communities are losing them, too.
Sedona might be swarming with tourists, but it’s not swarming with students.
Sedona-Oak Creek Unified School District has lost more than 300 students in the past seven years. The district’s enrollment dipped below 1,000 students in the past two years, according to Department of Education data.
That downturn has come with repercussions.
In 2018, the school board voted to close Big Park Community School, an elementary school in the village of Oak Creek, a suburb just south of the town’s main stretch.
It was painful for community members, school board member Randy Hawley said, but the board had little choice. Declining enrollment coupled with chronic funding issues was the school’s death knell.
“We’ve been underfunded from the state for 11 years,” he said. “With declining enrollment, it makes it difficult to maintain small elementary schools . ... It’s been a very difficult year for all of us.”
It’s getting more expensive to live in Sedona, Hawley said. The median home value is $513,800, according to real estate website Zillow. Short-term rentals have boomed, but long-term rentals are hard to come by, resulting in a housing shortage.
The shortage has created two problems: Teachers can’t afford to live in Sedona, so long commutes to more affordable areas hamper the district’s ability to recruit and retain teachers; and young families can’t easily afford to live in Sedona, causing enrollment to decline.
Big Park’s closure and affordable housing issues have been particularly difficult for Thea Sanderson-Jones, the parent of a 10-year-old with autism. She works in Sedona, but lives in Cottonwood, about 30 minutes away. Her boyfriend recently started working in Flagstaff, an hour away from Cottonwood.
They’d like to live in Sedona or Oak Creek to cut down on commutes, but they can’t afford to. Oak Creek would have been more affordable, but now its only elementary school is gone.
Her son’s school in Cottonwood is disappointing, she said. The district recently changed school boundaries and he was suddenly sent to a different school.
“I just don’t feel like he’s getting the best education,” Sanderson-Jones said.
Rural schools don’t perform as well
Arizona’s rural schools are not performing as well as their national peers.
A 2017 report, “Why Rural Matters” from The Rural School and Community Trust, ranked Arizona as one of the worst states for rural school graduation rates and performance on national standardized tests.
Nationally, the report calculated the average graduation rate for rural students as 87.3%, while Arizona’s was 77.5%. The rate for the state’s rural students of color was even lower at 53.2%, compared to 77.4% nationally.
Maricopa County’s third-graders had the highest average third-grade reading scores in 2018 on the state’s standardized test, AzMERIT, with 46% of thirdgraders scoring proficient or highly proficient on the assessment, according to Expect More Arizona.
In seven rural counties, fewer than 40% of third-graders passed the reading test. In Gila County, just 27% had proficient or highly proficient reading scores.
Third-grade reading is critical because that’s when experts say students need to start reading to learn instead of learning to read.
Arizona’s school funding formula is calculated per student, based on a complicated formula that accounts for, among other needs, whether a student needs special education services.
With fewer students, school districts get fewer dollars.
Those cuts are on top of cuts lawmakers made to school funding during the recession that still linger today. When adjusted for inflation, schools statewide are still getting less money per student than in 2009.
Rural school leaders, like Rickert and Hawley, said those recession-era cuts hit rural districts especially hard.
Suburban districts can somewhat counteract cuts with local taxes, which require voter approval. But that’s harder for rural districts, where the tax base is usually much smaller than a suburban district like Mesa, which has tens of thousands of taxpayers.
Data from Aportela, with the School Boards Association, shows that districts outside of Maricopa County are less likely to seek local tax funding through voter-approved bonds and overrides — and measures in those counties are also less likely to pass.
Sierra Vista Unified School District in southern Arizona unsuccessfully tried passing a $2.8 million maintenance and operations override in 2010.
Hollie Sheriff, a Sierra Vista school board member and a parent, said going without override funding means her district has a harder time attracting teachers with a competitive salary and benefits.
“Most larger school districts in the Phoenix area, in the Tucson area — they have override funding, so they have like up to 15% more funding per pupil than we have,” she said.
The district did recently pass a $29 million bond for new buildings and technology. It was the first time district voters passed a bond since 1991, according to the Herald Review, a local news outlet. But the bond only helps with capital needs. Sierra Vista can’t use the money for teacher salaries or lowering class sizes.
School funding woes ripple through a community when students aren’t getting the kind of education that will turn them into skilled workers, Sheriff said.
“It’s just that much harder to recruit and retain qualified people to work in our hospitals and in our businesses,” she said.
Communities work as schools change
Smaller communities are looking for solutions to some of these problems, Rickert said.
“There are a lot of really good, strong families that make up these rural communities. And they want their children to have the opportunity to raise families in the same types of communities,” he said.
Hawley, in Sedona, said district leaders have started a nonprofit foundation to raise money for the community’s students and schools. It’s raised nearly $450,000 in six months, he said. The money will go to college scholarships for Sedona students.
Now, the foundation is trying to raise money to help buy supplies and materials for classrooms.
“The community understands the issues and the problems we’re facing, and have stepped up,” he said.
Teachers in Globe and Miami are working together to try to train prospective teachers, aiming to keep them in the community, KJZZ’s Mariana Dale reported in April.
The Legislature has also offered help, like $2.6 million in one-time rural assistance funding in the 2018 budget, plus $3 million allocated that year to help connect rural schools to reliable internet.
Sen. David Bradley, D-Tucson, said he’s introduced bills to fund a community schools pilot program for years, with no success.
The program would bring more community resources, like mental health counseling and free food for families directly to schools. That would help keep students in school, Bradley said.
Oral health problems, for example, keep kids out of schools. Bringing a dentist directly to the school could stem those problems, he said.
“It is figuring out what’s available, how to make it more convenient and accessible,” he said.
The pilot program would cost the state $250,000 and this legislative session was tacked on to a bill connected to the 2020 budget. The bill failed.
Arizona Department of Education spokesman Stefan Swiat said via email that State Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman’s administration is working on what’s called the “Arizona Student Opportunity Collaborative.”
The program, developed by Glen Lineberry, principal at Miami High School in eastern Arizona, will build a network of qualified teachers to connect with rural students online, allowing rural schools to offer more rigorous courses.
Sheriff said she wants to provide “everything we possibly can” to the students in Sierra Vista.
But that’s not always easy in Arizona. “I just feel like we’re getting left behind,” she said. “And its impacting not only the students that we serve, but our communities. I think we deserve more.”